She bangs the drums

Just been looking at Sarah Brown's Twitter profile. Most of her tweets - and they are obviously hers, not the work of a Downing Street apparatchik - are about her work on maternal health, which seems to be picking up momentum. Of all the Millennium Development Goals maternal health is the one which is least likely to be met - more than half a million women each year die in childbirth or from pregnancy-related problems - and it really needs a champion, which Sarah is doing by promoting the work of the White Ribbon Alliance. And she manages to get the balance right; despite using her profile to draw attention to the issue, it's still about the cause, not about her - unlike some of the celebrities who align themselves with 'worthy' causes.

She's also obviously interested in other development issues - she's been tweeting today about malaria too. What is also appealing about her 'tweets' is that you get little insights into normal life at Downing Street; she's been planting vegetable seeds with the two boys (at least I assume it's at No. 10, might be Chequers I suppose) and the seed trays are 'peat free', she says. I don't know her at all, but I get the impression that she must be quite clued up about environmental and ethical issues. The press recently reported that she declined to eat veal and foie gras at a banquet at the recent Nato summit in France, which as you can imagine, met with my approval.

And today's Times is saying nice things about her too.